Servants

Royal households, vast in Tudor times, gradually shrank over the centuries, but many of their features remained static over time.

Grace and favour apartment, Hampton Court Palace

The royal household did not permanently occupy any one of the palaces, and in fact much of the time Hampton Court or the lodgings at the Tower of London were left mothballed while the king or queen was elsewhere.

Tudor chamber pot, Hampton Court Palace As many as 800 servants could accompany Henry VIII on visits to Hampton Court Palace, and his wife and daughter had additional households of their own. The Lord Chamberlain was in charge of the state rooms of the palace, while the Lord Steward was responsible for all the ‘below stairs’ areas such as the kitchens. The Master of the Horse had the important responsibility for transport and the royal stables. The Gentlemen of the Bedchamber were the King’s closest servants, and were headed by the most intimate servant of all, the Groom of the Stool. The many, many other servants ranged down to the lowliest necessary women (who emptied the chamber pots) and the kitchen boys.

Some of the royal servants had unusual jobs or backgrounds. Jeffrey Hudson, a young man of restricted growth, was given to Charles I’s French wife Henrietta Maria as birthday present (eighteen inches tall, he stepped out of a pie as a surprise for her).

A 17th-century servant was required to follow a strict code of etiquette. William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1622) states that servants should be ‘so full of courtesy as not a word shall be spoken by their masters to them, or by them to their masters, but the knee shall be bowed withall: they can stand hour after hour before their masters, and not once put on their hat: if they be walking after their masters, their master shall not turn sooner then their hat will be off, and that so oft as he turneth or speaketh to them’.

In 1670, a Hannah Woolley advised that a cook-maid ‘ought to be of a quick and nimble Apprehension, neat and cleanly in her own habit, and then we need not doubt of it in her Office; not to dress her self, especially her Head, in the Kitchin, for that is abominable sluttish, but in her Chamber, before she comes down, and that to be at a fit hour, that the fire may be made, and all things prepared for the Cook, against he or she comes in, she must not have a sharp Tongue, but humble, pleasing and willing to learn, for ill words may provoke blows from a Cook’.

The Victorian servants of the later, non-royal residents at Hampton Court Palace suffered from the petty restrictions placed upon palace life, and from their employer’s strict moral code. On 28th May, 1893, a grace and favour resident called Mrs Dalison wrote earnestly to the Lord Chamberlain about the indecorous behaviour of a fellow resident’s servants. She complained that ‘Soldiers and Whatman, the Boatman’s son, continually spend nights or long periods of time shut up with the maids in the attics’. Exasperated, she ranted that ‘My house-keeper and my man servant saw a Soldier go up with one of the maids at 8pm and saw the same come down at past 6am’.

Servants

Servants

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